Not so long ago, a well-known and by no means ignorant critic waxed lyrical to me about a film he had just seen by a director totally unknown to him. He found the film fascinating and unlike anything he had seen before. It was called The Red and the White, and its maker was Miklos Jancso, a Hungarian. Jancso may be largely forgotten now, but in the 1960s and early 1970s he was one of the most famous film-makers in Europe, the recipient of the best director award at Cannes and of numerous other festival trophies. Then, for a long time, there was silence. He seemed to just fade out of the limelight.

Now, not before time, there is a retrospective of his work at the Edinburgh festival and later at the National Film Theatre. Those who have not seen any of it may well have the same reaction as the critic I met. He is, indeed, an astonishing director.

The Red and the White was made in 1968 and set in central Russia during the civil war of 1918. Its narrative describes the bloody battles between the red revolutionary troops and the counter-revolutionary whites in the hills along the Volga. Jancso doesn't seem to take sides. He simply details the various manoeuvres, moving from a deserted monastery to a riverbank field hospital and finally to a pitched battle on a hillside where the reds were massacred.

This is a portrait of pure mayhem. There are identifiable characters, but none of them are developed as either fascists or communists, and scarcely as human beings. They are merely pawns in a grisly power game which, Jancso suggests, always ends the same way - with the slaughter of the innocent as well as the guilty. Figures in a landscape, if you like. And what a landscape.

Jancso's Cinemascope camera traverses the vast, unchanging territory in long, expansive and expressive takes. Men and horses weave patterns on it that are almost balletic, as if pulled hither and thither by invisible strings. There is little in the way of a screenplay, but the commentary on war and the abuse of power is eloquent enough to make words seem unnecessary. The film is a tour de force of a very special kind and a piece of cinema unlike anything else coming out of world cinema at the time. It was, of course, banned in Russia for many years.

It was not Jancso's first film. That was The Bells Have Gone to Rome in 1958, which demonstrated his preoccupation with the fractured history of his country and the social and political upheavals of the time. The first to reach the west was The Round-Up some seven years later. The Russian title literally means The Hopeless and in it Jancso details the same barbaric cruelty and deceit that he felt was an inevitable part of the political process.

This time the film is set on Jancso's beloved Hungarian plains, where a band of peasants are being kept under close surveillance following the Kossuth rebellion of 1848. There are informers everywhere, and neither side knows who or where they are. All we know is that there will be no happy ending and that even the people we imagine to be heroes are flawed.

Once again, the filming is brilliant, with long takes, moving geometrical patterns of men, horses and even naked women and whips (sex is never far away in Jancso films) around the spectacular terrain. Once again, too, there is a deliberate distancing which prevents us identifying with the characters for fear that we will lose the underlying significance of Jancso's black view of Hungarian history. It could also be that this way Jancso could defy the communist censors better, since they would be unlikely to understand the signs and symbols that litter the films.

Other, similar films followed, like Silence and Cry, The Confrontation and Red Psalm, each striving to produce a vision of which the central tenet was the way history repeats itself through the abuse of power in the name of a pummelled and put-upon people. Then Jancso seemed to grow tired of expressing his forebodings - and some of us grew tired of his cinematic pattern-making, superb as it was. He went to Italy, where sex and politics mixed more directly.

His films there, divorced from the Hungarian landscape, were less good and culminated in an extraordinary offering called Private Vices, Public Virtues, based vaguely on the Mayerling story but seeming to concentrate more on private vices and a kind of bitter erotica than on the sweep of politics, culture and history.

His return to Hungary has allowed him, now an old man - he was born in 1921 - to renew himself somewhat. But his later films scarcely match his first, which, as a previous Guardian critic (Richard Roud) once said, were among the strongest, and strangest, of the postwar era.

Divorcing himself from the Hungarian tradition of heavy historical and literary adaptations, he insisted that it was impossible to separate aesthetics from politics and once decreed that there was "no finer aesthetic pleasure than the discovery of justice". There also seemed to be for him no finer aesthetic pleasure than the great grasslands of his native country upon which so many of his dramas unfolded.

· The Miklos Jancso retrospective is at the Filmhouse 2, Edinburgh (0131-228 4051), from August 18.